Why 2016 Will Be the Year of the Viral Election

Earlier this week, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham shared a video online in which he visits all manner of wanton destruction upon a harmless cell phone. The video was a response to a speech given by Donald Trump. The improbable Republican frontrunner called Graham an idiot and a lightweight, and gave out the senator's personal phone number, doxxing him, as they say. There's a lot to unpack in the one-minute clip, although the least surprising revelation is the fact that Graham seems to still use a flip phone. But the best part comes around 35 seconds in, when in the process of swinging a wooden sword at a phone dangling on a string, Graham follows through and rips a tear in the paper backdrop hanging behind him.

Perhaps it's not surprising that the video was produced with IJ Review, the site best known for employing BuzzFeed meme plagiarist Benny Johnson, because it's emblematic of what's become a current trend in presidential candidacy communications: the production of Content.

2016 will by no means be the first Internet-driven presidential election, or even the first to rely on social media. In the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama's team recognized the potential of social media to galvanize his base, effectively utilizing Facebook and an app to engage voters, and, more importantly, remind them to get friends in their social networks to vote themselves.

Mitt Romney made passing stabs at using Twitter and Facebook, but, for the most part, his most memorable moments online came when he stepped on his own dick—the infamous "binders full of women" comment, and the "47 percent" speech that went viral, for example. Obama's campaign ultimately spent 10 times as much as Romney on digital strategy, at $47 million, and, well, it seems to have worked out pretty well for him.

With such a vast, sprawling field of candidates now, their teams are well aware of how important social media is to remaining in the public eye, but there's something different about the way they're using it this time out. Graham's video seems, at least in one sense, to have been a success, racking up over a million views in 24 hours. But, like most Content online, it is effectively devoid of any actual content. It tells us nothing about the candidate, besides reminding us that he exists. Its raison d'être is to be made and consumed hastily, shared, then promptly forgotten. In other words, it's the Platonic ideal of contemporary Internet communication. The message is no longer the medium; rather, the medium is now the message.

Graham isn't the only candidate to have employed this strategy, of course. Hillary Clinton has long since completed her transition into a bipedal meme, and Donald Trump is nothing if not an anthropomorphized comments section, or a @dril character made flesh. Ted Cruz, already a sort of less lovable hybrid of Montgomery Burns and Ned Flanders, pushed out a video, produced, of course, with BuzzFeed, in which he runs through a series of Simpsons character voices. It garnered a respectable 650,000 views, but, like much other Content, is devoid of any meaningful message besides "please join us in remembering this relatable pop culture reference." Even that was somehow more respectable than Clinton's bizarre Vine in which she appears with a bottle of iced tea in a koozie that reads "More like Chillary Clinton amirite?" BuzzFeed also churned out a highly shareable bit with Carly Fiorina, titled "If Men Were Treated Like Women in the Office with Carly Fiorina (Presidential Candidate)" just in case you didn't know who that was. LOL.

Elsewhere, Rand Paul put together a montage of metaphorical destruction of his own in which he, among other things, takes a chainsaw to a pile of paper meant to represent the tax code while a badass guitar version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" rips in the background. It's a stilted mix between a video postcard from your parents at Christmastime and a hostage video of a man with Stockholm syndrome, but with slightly worse production values. Still, it definitely exists, there's no denying that. He made it, and then his team went and put it online, and now we know about it, so, mission accomplished. Both Christie and Sanders have also tossed up, because why not, that way it's there, cutesy404 error pages. These guys get it.

Let's not forget, while we're at it, Bobby Jindal's video of himself informing his family that he'd be running, by far the scariest installment of the Paranormal Activity-style found-footage horror genre yet. I keep expecting Chris Hansen to show up and ask him to have a seat every time I watch. The list goes on and on. Chris Christie farted out a series of mock movie trailers when he wasn't busy dancing on viral Content incubator concern The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. That video, with 9 million views in the year since it was posted, was called "The Evolution of Dad Dancing." You might call this political Content strategy The Evolution of Dad Memeing.

The old conventional wisdom used to be that voters wanted to pick a president who seemed like the type of person they'd want to have a beer with. Now they're presenting themselves as the type of person we'd want to be in a Snapchat story with. Speaking of which, Paul's team was very, very excited about letting the kids know he's on Snapchat now. And consider Marco Rubio's not at all thirsty-seeming insistence that he's going to see Straight Outta Compton, just in case any of us forgot that he's a chill dude who loves the hip-hops. Bernie Sanders, a candidate tailor-made for the Twitter generation, is apparently a big hip-hop fan himself, as he follows, and has favorited Lil B on Twitter. As one friend of mine put it, "ty Based Bernie."

It goes without saying that this represents a coarsening of the discourse around presidential campaigning, a genre of entertainment that doesn't exactly need a nudge any further into the shitter. Nonetheless, it's still tapping into heretofore undiscovered reserves of embarrassment that I didn't even know I had left. Not only because it's corny to see old people try to speak the language of youth, the presidential equivalent of Steve Buscemi undercover in high school (do you get that reference like I do?!), but it's symptomatic of the nothingness that communication online in general has become.

We've seen this slouching-into-the-abyss act play out before with publications that have made the shift from sharing ideas into sharing memes, but this is the first presidential campaign since The Year We Broke the Internet. Presidential candidates in the past used Facebook and their websites to share positions, speeches, and so on, trying to bring their message to the place where people spend most of their time now, but this time around it's more about sharing for the sole purpose of being sharing and nothing else. A proposed economic policy is never going to go viral, they know that, much like publications learned that a reported piece on economic issues won't. Whether shares and likes can be translated into the currency of votes remains to be seen, websites have had a hard time turning them into revenue, and young people are notoriously difficult to wrangle into spending money on media or spending political capital at the ballot box.

Maybe it doesn't matter. Like publications, candidates themselves have finally wised up to the fact that it doesn't matter what it is people are sharing, or even saying about you at all, it's just important that they're sharing. They may not like you, but as long as they Like you, you're still in the conversation.

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